All programs should tell you where they store config files

Technology@beehaw.org – 757 points – 1 years ago

utcc.utoronto.ca

I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can't tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.

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If it's not in /etc it should be in the directory the exe file is located.

~/.config is the non-root version of /etc these days. But you just have to know that, which isn't ideal.

If you are a developer, please take a look at the XDG Base Directory Specification and try to follow it, users will be very grateful.

Short summary: Look for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for configs and $XDG_STATE_HOME for state. If they aren't available, use the defaults (./config and .local/share).

But what about .local/, or .appname/? It's just a mess

~/.local is the non-root version of /usr. By .appname do you just mean a folder that a specific app made in your home for itself? Yeah, I never condone that. imo that's just a badly behaving app. It should move that folder into ~/.config.

Configuration for root is in /root/, that is, root's home directory. /etc is for system configuration, different thing.

Certainly not. Nothing should write to /usr/bin except for the package manager in FHS distros and some distros binary directories aren't writable at all.

Well good because a program shouldn’t be writing to its config file either.